Blawg World 2007 and the TechnoLawyer Problem Solution Guide
TechnoLawyer has released TWO-TWO-TWO-EBOOKS IN ONE! (above).
The first EBook, BlawgWorld 2007, contains the best posts chosen by some of the world's top legal bloggers. Though I won't include my Settle It Now Negotiation Blog as one of the "World's Best," I am honored to appear among such Blawg heavyweights as Gerry Riskin's Amazing Firms Amazing Practices, Laura C. Woods Phosita, Justin Patten's Human Law, Evan Schaeffer's Legal Underground, J. Matthew Buchanan's Promote the Progress, Stephen Albainy-Jenei's Patent Baristas, Arnie Herz's Legal Sanity, J. Craig Williams' May It Please the Court, and John Wallbillich's Wired GC
The second EBook, TechnoLawyer's Problem Solution Guide, is a compendium of common questions and innovative answers to your most daunting legal-technical questions.
Though I contributed to both E-Books, I'm giving you here one of my favorite negotiation posts, "Rationalizing Numbers," which also appears there.
I urge you to download this free E-Book and puruse it at your leisure over the course of the following year before all of today's technology gets replaced by tomorrow's . . . at which point another TechnoLawyer/Blawg World EBook will appear on the web. Isn't that GREAT?
That said, here's one of my favorite negotiation posts.
Rationalizing Numbers
I won $200 at Morongo recently, accompanying my husband to one of his law fi rm’s business development events. I always think gambling (excuse me, gaming) outings are good for lawyers and business people—the litigation risk-taking analogies being so plentiful.
The lesson from this trip, however, was not about sunk costs or risk aversion. It was about my own subjective experience of money.
“Don’t worry,” I was saying to Mr. Thrifty, as I pulled three twenties from my wallet to pay for an afternoon gourmet picnic in Griffi th Park. “I’m paying for it with the casino’s money.”
Thrifty gently reminded me that this was the third time I’d spent my winnings—the fi rst on that spa visit before I hit the gaming fl oor; the second on a few Crate and Barrel essentials we picked up at the outlet stores so conveniently located next to the hotel; and, the third for our picnic in the park.
Actually, by the time we were collecting our food tickets, I’d also “spent” my unexpected windfall on the gift I’d planned to buy for my father’s birthday the following week.
Spending Your Negotiation Dollar Ten Ways from Sunday
The lesson of my little gaming foray? In negotiations, two and two is rarely if ever four. You can place your two dollar bets on winning; fairness; future opportunities; or, investment return. You can lay your chips down on need or equity or equality. You can wager your money (or more importantly, your negotiating partner’s money) on common sense or risk aversion.
You can spend it on respect or conserve it with empathy and understanding. The brilliant part of all of this is that you can spend the same two dollars on each of these things during any negotiation session, doubling your two with every move so that by day’s end it has become six, eight, ten or even one hundred.
When your mediator is engaged in shuttle diplomacy, she is consciously doing that which we all unconsciously do everyday—rationalizing numbers and creating subjective monetary “accounts.” How important are these subjective “accounts” and how infl uential our monetary rationalizations?
Leigh Thompson of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University tells us in the Mind and Heart of the Negotiator, that monetary accounts are important enough to strongly influence the outcome of a negotiation even if they are meaningless.
Any Reason Is Better Than No Reason at All
It’s no suprise that busy social psych researchers have studied the art of getting what you want by saying why you want it. In one study, the usual cadre of beleaguered undergraduates was asked to negotiate cutting in line at a photocopy machine. Id.
Those who provided no rationale were, not surprisingly, the least successful. Id. Only sixty percent of them were allowed to “cut” into the line. Id. Those who presented a logical rationale, however, got what they wanted an extraordinary 94% of the time. Id.
But here’s the truly remarkable part. Those students who presented a meaningless rationale such as, “I want to cut in line because I need to make copies,” racked up a ninety-three percent success rate, only one percent less than their logical peers. Id.
Proven Rationales Acquire the Largest Slice of the Distributive Pie
Even though any excuse whatsoever appears to do the trick, Thompson offers the following advice for “spending” your two dollars as if they were a hundred:
- use objective sounding rationales and invite your opponent to buy into them;
- label your proposals as “fair,” “even splits,” or “compromises,”
- understanding that notions of fairness are purely subjective—each deal-maker focusing on only those norms that serve his own interests;
- avoid falling for the “even split” ploy which invariably benefi ts the person who offers it; and,
- understand (and use) the three basic “fairness” principles—equality, in which everyone benefits or suffers equally—a principle governing the distribution of government resources; equity or proportionality which is based on merit and governs the distribution of resources in the private sector; and, need, which often comes into play where the parties are of greatly unequal bargaining power. Id.
Those are today’s tips. I’m off to spend those gambling winnings on my dad’s birthday gift. The only person this kind of accounting never fools is Mr. Thrifty. And to him, all I can say is, “I’m sorry honey but I’ve got a lot of other fine qualities.”
